The best evidence that technology is having an impact on teaching and learning can be found not in the pages of professional journals - where those at the forefront present well-documented findings, case studies and informed opinions - but in the pages of the mainstream press. Prepared and packaged for consumers, those periodicals offer a much different assessment of the technology explosion and its maddening intrusion into the hallowed halls of educational institutions. And the picture they paint taps into the greatest fears of learners, their parents or guardians, regulating agencies and taxpayers.
Atlantic Monthly magazine took the boldest step yet by the mainstream press with its cover article by Todd Oppenheimer called "The Computer Delusion" (July 1997). Oppenheimer reminds us of the failed promises technology has held for education since Thomas Edison first predicted in 1922 that "the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and . . . in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." Backed by the skepticism of such technoluminaries as Esther Dyson, MIT's Sherry Turkle and the U.S. Department of Education's Linda Roberts, Oppenheimer deconstructs the protechnology arguments. He concludes there is no hard evidence that computers and technology have any measurable effect on learning. They may in fact, he says, hold some responsibility for educational decline.
On the issue of whether or not technology can benefit education, the good news is that it is not - nor should it be - an all-or-nothing proposition. Even organizations such as Educom, which promote the benefits of technology to the educational process, don't believe there is only one model for education. In fact, one of the benefits of technology, according to Educom, is that it offers more customized learning environments, whereas traditional, classroom-based education suits only a small percentage of the learning population. The bad news is that we are still only at the beginning of a dramatic period of change and there is the danger that fear will warp the process.
In 1994 Educom launched its Educom Medal Awards Program, not for the purpose of obtaining formal data on the effectiveness of technology in teaching and learning, but to support its position that technology can in fact improve the quality of education, increase access to educational services, and reduce the costs associated with higher education. Every year, Educom works with academic disciplinary societies to select individuals in specific fields who have demonstrated that information technology can improve the undergraduate learning experience. In October 1997 six individuals were awarded the Educom Medal and as information about their work emerges, it has become increasingly clear that their views about technology's role in the educational process are as diverse as their academic disciplines. I talked with this year's winners about their work and their attitudes toward the role of technology in improving education.
Fear and Resistance
As a professor of political science at Northwestern University and an avid exploiter of software- and Web-based learning materials, Jerry Goldman believes there exists fear of and resistance to technology in higher education "everywhere except with students." University administrators, he says, �look with wonder but don't know what to do with the work we create. They like the benefits, but so far at least, they hesitate to pay the cost." Faculty, he says, say two prayers a day: "One for the parking god to find a spot near their building and the other for the PC god so that their computers will boot for word processing and e-mail. That's it."
Goldman - awarded the Educom Medal in 1997 for his work developing a number of software programs, CD-ROMs and Internet-based applications in his field - believes the tide will turn in favor of change in higher education and that faculty will ultimately embrace technology. "The easiest way for change to occur," he says, "is for administrators to take the lead by indicating that faculty pioneers will be rewarded for the work they do in IT. Absent such a move, it will take a generation of faculty to retire or die before any real shifts occur."
The most progressive proponents of change in higher education point to the continuing rise in demand for higher education services and the inability of the current structure to meet that demand without bankrupting itself or its students. For them, change must happen at the topmost administrative level; in other words, higher education leaders and state-level policy makers must seriously consider alternatives to the so-called place-based education system. That, however, in no way implies that change is not happening at the grassroots level. Even though Goldman may be right about resistance to technology on the part of faculty in a general sense, a small but growing number of instructors are using technology to improve teaching and learning and they are doing so in ways that scale to other courses and disciplines - an important distinction when one considers the enormous cost in time, energy and money that courseware development and other technology-based educational applications consume.
Jon Barwise of Indiana University and John Etchemendy of Stanford University - awarded the Educom Medal as a team for their work leading development teams on three computer programs that advanced the teaching of formal logic - point to the rigidity of the university system as an obstacle to the bottom-up approach to change in higher education. According to Barwise, tenure is a problem, but he points out that such an assessment is shorthand for something more complex: "People [in higher education] think in terms of three things: research, teaching and service, in that order. That is what all of the rewards, including tenure, are based on. The development of courseware does not really fit into the picture. In our experience, it has elements of all three. It certainly takes research and has an impact on research. It takes inspiration from teaching, and it ultimately finds its way back into instruction and learning. And there is a large service component to it, as it takes so much dedication to the subject and to education to see it through. But it also goes beyond this, since it is so time-consuming and requires a whole set of skills that faculty don't typically have when they start. So the reward system actively discourages faculty from getting seriously involved in the kinds of projects we have been involved in."
Technology's Real Impact on Improved Student Learning
Barwise and Etchemendy suspected in 1984 that the graphical user interface inherent in the newly introduced Macintosh computer system could be used to help their students think about complex concepts. Their suspicions turned out to be correct, following completion of three popular computer programs in the area of formal logic, for which they led development teams: Turing's World, Tarski's World and Hyperproof. "Before Turing's World," says Barwise, "it was hard for beginning students to really grasp the power of the Turing model of a computer - to imagine that they are as powerful as they are - because all the students could do was create little toy Turing machines on paper. Our idea was to provide a graphics environment in which they could really program Turing machines, watch them at work, and debug them." The response by students was overwhelmingly positive. "There was simply no comparison in the quality of understanding between students who used Turing's World and those who had come earlier and did not have it available," Barwise says. "Turing's World let students go much farther much faster and have more fun at the same time."
In an age when everyone from faculty to administrators to policy makers is demanding evidence of improved learning, Barwise and Etchemendy point to three formal studies conducted using Barwise's and Etchemendy's courseware; two using Tarski's World - one at Stanford's School of Education and one at a university in Holland; and one using Hyperproof - at Edinburgh's Human Computer Research Centre. According to Etchemendy, "They each have a different focus, but all have shown substantial positive effects on student learning."
Dawn Tilbury of the University of Michigan and William Messner of Carnegie Mellon University - awarded the Educom Medal as a team for the development of the Michigan-CMU Control Tutorials for MATLAB - point to statistics from UM's Web server showing thousands of accesses to their Web-based tutorials from all over the world. "There are now more than 60 mirror sites in 13 countries on six continents," says Tilbury, "and this includes more than 40 U.S. educational institutions comprising more than 10 percent of the electrical engineering and mechanical engineering departments in the country."
Bill Messner believes the key to the widespread acceptance of new educational technology is whether it makes the job of both the instructor and the student easier. "If it does," he says, "the world will beat a path to your door, as our statistics demonstrate. The Control Tutorials for MATLAB facilitate instruction and learning by providing relevant information in an easy-to-use format. Now we find that students use the software even when it's not required."
On the grassroots level, a growing number of faculty members are experimenting with technology for the purpose of improving student learning, and they each interpret the value, benefits and drawbacks differently. "Obviously, technology is not good or bad in itself," says Etchemendy. "It depends on how it is used. There has been a huge amount of hype, fueled largely by those who have an interest in selling technology. As a result, schools and universities feel they need to invest large amounts of money in new technologies before they have really figured out how to use them efficiently and effectively."
Michelle Lamberson - an Educom Medal award winner in the area of geology - agrees. The educational technology coordinator for the faculty of science at the University of British Columbia does not believe that the potential of technology to improve student learning has as much to do with how it is used in the classroom as it has with how technology can expand the traditional classroom walls. "Educational malpractice," she says, referring to the way the Atlantic Monthly described the willingness of educators to invest in technology over other things such as music teachers and textbooks, "can happen regardless of the delivery method. Anyone can give just as poor a lecture with PowerPoint as with chalk."
Etchemendy insists, however, that computer-based learning - courseware in particular - is causing a welcome revolution. "Computers are far and away the most flexible tools ever created by mankind," he says, "and as such, they will eventually revolutionize how most subjects are taught. Textbooks, blackboards, overhead projectors, slide projectors and videocassette recorders - all are tools that allow us to teach more effectively. The computer is an infinitely malleable tool, and it has the potential to enable us to teach things we were never able to teach before and to teach in high school or even earlier certain subjects that were once confined to advanced college-level courses."
Formalizing the Process
One of the central problems of relying on the interest and innovation of faculty in using technology - with or without administrative support and recognition - is not only the burden of development, testing and programming, but also the added pressure of marketing, distribution and maintenance. In these early years of technology's integration into the instructional process, no logical methods or procedures exist for managing those disparate functions. "One problem we faced throughout the process," says Barwise, "is the split in the Mac and PC worlds." Other problems include marketing and distribution. "Universities are used to getting course material developed on the cheap as faculty write textbooks," he says. "But with courseware, a different magnitude of development is required. To do development, it takes a team of faculty with expertise in a subject area and programmers. And in our experience, a professional manager is a godsend to the process." One solution to the development, cost and marketing problems, according to Barwise, would be for universities to set up structures - either internal or collaborative across universities - to ensure the development of high-quality courseware products.
For years, technology advocates have worried that computers are capable of far more complex tasks than their common applications imply. Most faculty and administrators, they say, rarely go beyond their computer's word processing capabilities, thereby turning expensive machines into glorified typewriters. Now that the mass adoption of the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular is changing conventional attitudes toward technology, instructors are more willing to exploit the technology for the benefit of student learning. But little will happen - and much less will happen efficiently and cost-effectively - unless structures are set up to leverage the strengths of colleges and universities across the board for the benefit of higher education in general.
What is needed, says Barwise, "is some kind of confederation or organization supported by the computer and software industry, as well as higher education, that funds and coordinates the development of courseware, that markets, and that promotes. I don't know exactly, but I do know that without some sort of collaborative effort across schools - financially supported by industry - higher education is going to fall even further behind. Computers are costing universities an enormous amount of money, and those universities are not getting anything like the payback they could get because of the failure to overcome the problems blocking the development of good educational software."
Setting a Course for Higher Education
Organizations such as Educom strongly believe that higher education is in a precarious position. They point out that traditional, place-based, credit-for-contact educational models are expensive and cannot meet the rising demand for educational services, especially if the growing proposition that lifelong education is, and will continue to be, a fact of life is to be believed. In addition, undergraduate student demographics are changing. More and more students fall outside the stereotype of the 18- to 22-year-old requiring campus-based housing and related amenities. Many today are adult learners, and they usually have jobs, families and other obligations that prevent them from wanting or needing a campus-based experience. In addition, the private sector - increasingly unhappy with the level of competence of graduates - is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in private education facilities. The question of whether or not higher education can or will change in order to survive is one that many are asking.
"The view from my perch at Northwestern University," says Goldman, "only hints at institutions far afield from NU in resources. There are still plenty of parents who want their kids to have an old-fashioned education, and they have the money to pay for it. Some institutions will talk about IT and show off their networking ability and smart classrooms. But this means little if the curriculum doesn't change and if the pioneers are driven away from their institutions by the guildmasters."
The issue of classroom-based versus distance learning also persists, with Educom and other leaders claiming that some combination of both will lead us closer to a solution in terms of cost, accessibility and quality. "In my limited experience," says Goldman, "the classroom seems far less relevant to me and my students. But I also sense that one-to-one e-mail supervision eats up vast quantities of time. It may be possible to cook up a course-in-a-box to provide student-centered education, but I have not yet seen viable examples of this concept in practice."
Others are less willing to view moving away from the place-based experience as a benefit for learners. Nor do they believe that technology will necessarily enable students to take better control of their learning; it's how it's used that counts. "If the availability of technology miraculously causes students to take responsibility for their learning, then hurrah!" says Lamberson. "Students have always had control of their learning resources. They have textbooks, there are libraries, the information is available to be learned. We are not trying to hold back information from students. We cannot force students to think; we cannot put the material in their heads. They have to be driven with a need to know. That onus has been, and always will be, on them. Our job is to do whatever we can to inspire them to think; to help them develop their ability to learn. New media-based technology resources can be very powerful tools, but they have to be used properly to achieve results."
Educators, administrators, policy makers and learners offer innumerable perspectives on what makes for quality education, drawing from both personal and professional experiences. Technology is a fact of life, as evidenced by the vociferous objections of the neo-Luddite movement, and it will more and more become a fact of learning. The debates that emerge in the mainstream and professional press are useful but no more so than practical experience, creativity and the willingness to think in completely new terms. That is not to say that all we know about education should be displaced. Today's prevailing attitudes toward technology are in many ways a reaction to the puffed-up promises that publications such as Atlantic Monthly are right to question. It makes sense to question the hype and to curb our love affair with computer features. It makes better sense to remind ourselves that we are at the beginning of an era - and, necessarily, at the end of another.
Wendy Rickard Bollentin is president of The Rickard Group, Inc, and editor and publisher of OnTheInternet magazine. [email protected].